Father John A. Hardon, S.J. Archives

Christology

Devotion to the Sacred Heart and Modern Christology

Any balanced approach to the modern devotion to the Sacred Heart must take
into account what kind of thinking is going on in some nominally Catholic theological
circles in our day.

No doubt, there are some thoroughly orthodox theologians writing about the
Devotion to the Heart of Christ. They are totally committed to the teachings
of the Church, basing themselves squarely in the tradition of Chalcedon, Ephesus
and the Nicene Creed. But they are being overshadowed, not to say silenced,
by the highly publicized spokesmen for a new brand of Christology. They might
even speak piously about the Sacred Heart Devotion, but they have in greater
or less measure removed its doctrinal foundation.

At the risk of starting with an over-long quotation, I will give some sentences
from Richard McBriens widely used book Catholicism, to set the stage
for this presentation. McBrien opens his chapter on The Christ of Twentieth
Century Theology with these statements:

Catholic Christology from the time of Aquinas to the middle
of the twentieth century remained essentially the same in structure and in content The
residual medieval influence was particularly evident in the raising of subsidiary
questionse.g., whether Christ could have been called a human being or the Christ
while he lay in the tomb between Good Friday and Easter Sunday; the reconciliation
of the sadness of Christ with his smilessness; the legitimacy of devotion to
the Sacred Heart. (Catholicism, pp. 469-470).

The value of quoting McBrien is not to cite him as an example of a theologian
who trivializes Devotion to the Heart of Christ. It is rather to show how some
name writers, ostensibly Catholic, are talking about a residual medieval Christology
that still advocates Devotion to the Sacred Heart, and an updated Christology
that has moved beyond such unenlightened piety.

My plan for this paper is to do three things: first, to identify some of the
prevalent errors in modern Christology which threaten to undermine the Sacred
Heart Devotion; then to point out some of the legitimate developments of doctrine
on the person and work of Christ, and again show how they bear on this Devotion;
and finally to draw some practical conclusions.

Christologies at Variance with Catholic Doctrine

In scores of volumes and several hundred articles in journals in Europe and
the Americas, three main types of modern Christology have emerged at variance
with the Catholic churchs accepted teaching. They may be conveniently called
Christology from below, liberation Christology, and process Christology.

Christology from Below

Christology frombelow is contrasted with Christology from above.
The latter is also called high Christology, and begins with the premise that
there has always been an infinite God, who at a point in time came down to
earth to take on human nature and to redeem us by dying on the Cross. He is
supposed to have risen bodily from the grave, actually ascended into heaven
and is now literally at the right hand of His Father, from where He will come
on the last day to judge the living and the dead.

Compared with this medieval notion, the new Christology from below, or law
Christology starts with the Jesus of history. He was always a human being like
use, even when with St. Paul we claim He was without sin. He stands out above
other human beings not because He is God in human form, but because more than
anyone else He proclaimed the Kingdom of God and gave Himself to the extension
of this Kingdom as no one has ever done or, we may suppose, ever will do.

Inevitably, there is a wide and irreconcilable variety of these Christologies
from below.

Some of them claim that all the titles to divinity applied to Christ in the
New Testament are merely honorary. There is no pre-existence, no real incarnation,
and no redemption in any traditional sense of the term. Such doctrinal assertions
are simply the combined product of the ferrial faith of the early Christians
and of Greek speculation.

On these premises, the Christ of Christian faith is only and uniquely the historical
Jesus of Nazareth. In spite of what the evangelists or St. Paul say, Jesus
was not interested in proclaiming Himself. He was completely subordinated to
Gods cause, the Kingdom of God over the hearts and minds of the human race.
Jesus preached merely the direct, unrestricted rule of God over the world.

Confronting the selfish people of His day with this absolutist doctrine, Jesus
became a divisive figure. Some feared and hated Him beyond reason; others loved
and believed in Him, also beyond reason.

No doubt some of the statements that Jesus made about Himself were exaggerated.
They were never intended to claim that He was God. But no matter, the opposition
He aroused because of His incompromising stand on doing Gods will finally aroused
the hatred of His enemies until they brought Him to His death. All the evidence,
the law Christologists say, indicates that Jesus did not simply accept His death.
He actively provoked it. He appeared in His day as the personification of sin
and as the representative of all sinners. Not surprising the God with whom
Jesus had rhetorically identified Himself did not identify Himself with Jesus
at the end. Jesus was literally forsaken by God.

Everything seemed to have been useless. But Jesus death was not to be the
end. His devoted followers believed in Him so strongly that after His death,
they subjectively experienced Him as alive. The so called resurrection of Christ
was merely something that happened to the disciples. In the words of Hans Kung,
there remains the unanimous testimony of the first believers, who regarded
their faith as based on something that really happened to them (Signposts
for the Future, p.21, Thesis #10). To be stressed, however, is that the
resurrection of Christ did not actually happen outside the disciples minds.
It was not an empirical, historic fact.

Other advocates of a Christology, from below, are not as crude in their denial
of the hypostatic union. But their steady criticism of the Churchs preoccupation,
since Nicea, on one Christological model, a Christology from above has improverished
the Church of the insights now available in seeing Christ from a different perspective.
What is this perspective? To see Jesus as the parable of God, as the paradigm
of humanity, the one who realizes that human concerns and Gods concerns really
coincide; and that we should realize that we, like Christ, are of God, even
when death seems to contradict it. As expressed by Edward Schillebeeckx, Through
his historical self-giving, accepted by the Father, Jesus has shown us who God
is: a Deus humanissi mus (most human God), Jesus, An Experiment
in Christology, p. 669.

The number and diversity of these from below Christologists are past counting.
What they all have in common is a profound discomfort with the Churchs magisterial
teaching about Christs divinity, and the resulting doubt they leave in any
sympathetic reader as to whether the centuries-old doctrine on the hypostatic
union is still unqualifyingly true.

Liberation Theology

A distinctive form of Christologists from below has emerged in recent years.
For want of a better term, they have come to be called liberation theologians.
Some of them are more systematic than others, but they all have one feature
in common, they stress the historical Jesus over the Christ of faith, and they
do so on one main premise: that Jesus did not preach Himself but His Kingdom,
and His Kingdom is to liberate the financially and materially poor from their
earthly poverty.

Perhaps the most systematic among these theologians of liberation is Leonard
Boff, the Brazilian writer, whose book Jesus Christ Liberator has become
something of a classic.

According to Boff, Jesus did not come to give an explanation of reality, but
to make an urgent demand for a complete change of reality. The Kingdom that
Jesus came to preach, says Boff, is the realization of a utopia, involving
complete liberation, a liberation that is also structural and eschatological
(p.280).

Jesus preaches a God, says Boff, who is to be reached not so much through prayer
and religious observance as through service of the poor, in whom dwells the
true God. Jesus establishes kinship, by preference, with societys outcasts.
He rejects wealth; He abhors political power; and He teaches a totally new religion,
which is glorifying God by struggling for liberation from earths oppression.

Summarily, then, it is quite secondary and quite dispensable, in Boffs theology,
what Christians think of Christ. It is peripheral to Christianity whether Christ
was a divine person who assumed a human nature; whether the hypostatic union
is really true; or whether Jesus actually rose in a physical body from the dead.
What matters is whether the central message of the Gospels is carried into effect;
whether the poor are being delivered from their world oppressions, in a word,
to quote Boff, Life is more important than reflection (p. 157).

John Sobrino of El Salvador, like Boff, emphasizes the primacy of function,
over doctrine, and of action over splitting hairs about who Jesus is.

Critical to Sobrinos reading of the New Testament is the claim that Jesus
past can be recovered only to the extent that it pushes us towards the future.
Sobrino defines Christology as Liberation theology, (which) reflects on Jesus
himself as the way to liberation (p. 37).

Sobrino is unapologetically functional. What alone truly counts is what Jesus
is for us, not what He is in Himself. Sobrino does not hesitate to say in his
Christology at the Crossroads, that if at any time Christ ceased to be
of interest to people, or to serve the function of liberating people from their
earthly trials, he would cease to be the revelation of what human beings are,
and hence the revelation of who God is (p. 388).

As is obvious, when liberationists of this school of thought speak of the Jesus
of history, they are speaking mainly of present and future history. Christianity
thus becomes the record of what Jesus is doing for contemporary man, delivering
him not precisely from sin and the forces of moral evil, for a Kingdom in eternity.
Rather, Jesus is the Savior who redeems mankind from human and political slavery
in the here and now.

Process Christology

The third and final form of Christology that challenges the Churchs teaching
is more difficult to classify. When I call it Process Christology, I am borrowing
a term that has broader meaning, namely, Process Theology, and classifying Christologists
among those whoin some measure or otherplace God in the evolutionary process
of the world.

The prevalence that popularity of process Christology among Protestants is
a fact of contemporary scholarship. Men like Ponnenberg and Voltmann have become
almost classic in their field. One of my students at the University of Ottawa,
whose thesis on Ponnenberg I directed, spent several years just reading and
trying to decipher Ponnenberg, before he could decisively start analyzing Ponnenbergs
Christology. It is subtle and complex in the extreme.

Among professed Catholics, the most important in point of time, is Teilhard
de Chardin. In Teilhards thought, all history is a movement toward Christ,
whom he calls the Omega Point. In this perspective, Christ, like God
Himself, is in a constant evolutionary processthe world is becoming perfected
in and through Christ even as Christ is becoming perfected in and through the
world.

The critical issue for Chardin is his position on the nature of God. The problem,
he says, with people who consider Marxism atheistic is that they define God
too narrowly. Certainly if you conceive God as totally transcending the world,
then Marxism is godless. But once you realize that God is autologically part
of the universe, you see that Marxism is quite theistic and compatible with
Christianity.

On these premises, Christ and Christology and the hypostatic union take on
a very different meaning than the one taught by the Nicene Creed.

Karl Rahner is not commonly placed among Process Christologists, but I believe
he can be best understood in this way.

Rahners notion of evolution rises through much of his writing. It is deeply
influenced by Hegel. Matter and spirit, Rahner believes, are essentially related
to each other. They derive from the same creative act of God, and they have
a single goal or purpose in the fullness of the Kingdom preached by Christ.
The world and its history are moving ever forward. They are in constant process
of development, toward a unity of spirit and matter. Rahner, like Hegel, sees
this as a becoming higher. He calls this capacity for becoming something higher
as the power of self-transcendence.

How does Christ fit into this predetermined process of evolution. Says Rahner,
The permanent beginning and the absolute guarantee that this ultimate self-transcendence,
which is fundamentally unsurpassable, will succeed and has already begun, is
what we call the hypostatic union, (Foundations of Christian Faith,
p. 181).

In other words, the Incarnation was not so much God becoming Man, as the universe,
including man, becoming slowly but inevitably divinized. Jesus Christ, Rahner
insists, cannot be properly understood except from this evolutionary process.

Development of Christological Doctrine

By way of introduction, we should briefly explain what is development of doctrine,
for our purpose the doctrine of Christology.

True development of doctrine is the growing depth and clarity of understanding
of revealed mysteries. It is the progress in understanding what God especially
in the person of Christ, has revealed to the world. This growth in subjective
understanding by the Church takes place through the action of the Holy Spirit,
dwelling in the Church as her soul, and has to be validated by the Churchs
magisterium to be assured acceptance by the faithful.

One more note. Doctrinal development or dogmatic progress must be continuous.
This means it must be consistent with the Churchs teaching over the centuries.
To be authentic, it cannot be discontinuous or at variance with, or in contradiction
to what the Church has always held since the time of Christ.

Building on these premises, we can say that many areas of Christology have
developed in modern times. In fact, every aspect of Christology has witnessed
authentic progress. For the sake of convenience, I will here give only three,
namely: communitarianism, anthropocentrism, and Soteriology. Each of these
deserves a volume of commentary.

Communitarianism

A phrase that is being used today symbolizes what the communitarian development
means. The world it is said, is becoming a global village. Due to many factors,
including the communications media, the human race is fast growing into a single
community, where people everywhere are aware of one another, relate to one another,
sense a kinship with one another and see themselves responsible for one another
in a way and to a degree never before known in human history.

Inevitably this has had its influence on religion, every religion, including
Catholic Christianity, and within Christianity on the Catholic understanding
of it Founder, Jesus Christ.

There is a new sense of meaning to Jesus Christ as the one whom the world,
the whole world, desperately needs. The world includes the millions who have
so far never heard of Christ, but for whom Christ is desperately needed. More
still, Christ is needed not only (though primarily) to lead mankind to salvation
in the life to come. The world needs Christ even, and also, for this life,
here and now.

The consequences of this new insight are far-reaching. Christ is coming to
be seen as the only true answer to the staggering problems facing the modern
world. The responsibility this places on Christs followers, especially the
Churchs leaders, is staggering. They are to see Christ, as the Gospel presents
Him, only now as the Christ for everyone, whom everyone needs with an urgency
that can stand no delay.

One important proviso, however, Christ will save the world from its chaotic
situation, and the future of the Gospel is secure only if those who have the
true faith also have the humility and the wisdom to preach the true Christ,
the whole Christ, and not some mental construct of their, perhaps zealous imagination.

Anthropocentrism

There is a valid explanation of the preoccupation with Christs humanity these
days. One reason is that Christ is being recognized for what He is, God in
human form indeed; but nevertheless true man who came for men.

The Second Vatican Council could not have been plainer. It portrays Christ
as God who became a human being in order to identify with us human beings in
every way but sin.

Authentic development of Christology here means that the faithful are seeing
Christ more than ever as their Savior, of course, but as One whom they are to
follow, in fact strive to imitate in the practice of virtue and with resounding
emphasis, in the practice of charity.

Christ is, after all, God become Man. Given this doctrine of faith, the human
virtues of Christ are the attributes of God made manifest to us, for our imitation
and even duplication in our age of history.

Soteriology

Perhaps the single most significant development of modern Christology has been
in the field of Soteriology.

The mistaken stress of liberation theologians on the function of Christ is
freeing people from earthly oppression has this however. It focuses attention
on the forgotten fact that Christ is our Redeemer.

It is here that I cannot stress too much the importance of Pope John Pauls
Encyclical Redemptor Hominus.

It is the magna charta for anyone who wants to properly understand what true
Christology is all about in our day, and who wants to put this Christology into
practice. Parts of this precious document deserve to be memorized and whole
sections could be quoted profitably to show how critically important it is for
us, the Churchs leaders, to know Christ, the true Christ, so as to proclaim
Christ, the whole Christ, to a Christless world that is desperately in need
of a Redeemer.

Let me first quote one lengthy paragraph from Pope John Paul II.

Jesus Christ is the stable principle and fixed center of
the mission that God Himself has entrusted to man. We must all share in this
mission and concentrate all our forces on it, since it is more necessary than
ever for modern mankind. If this mission seems to encounter greater opposition
nowadays than ever before, this shows that today it was more necessary than
ever and, in spite of the opposition, more awaited than ever. Here we touch
indirectly on the mystery of the divine economy which linked salvation and
grace with the cross. It was not without reason that Christ said that the
kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and men of violence take it by force
and moreover that the children of this world are more astute than are the children
of light.

We gladly accept this rebuke, that we may be like those violent people of God
that we have so often seen in the history of the Church and still see today,
and that we may consciously join in the great mission of revealing Christ to
the world, helping each person to find himself in Christ, and helping the contemporary
generations of our brothers and sisters, the peoples, nations, states, mankind
in developing countries and countries of opulencein short, helping everyone
to get to know the unsearchable riches of Christ, since these riches are for
every individual and are everybodys property.

I make no apology for the long quotation. It is meant to serve as an introduction
to my conclusion of this paper on Devotion to the Sacred Heart and Modern Christology.

Summary Conclusions

We end where we began, by emphasizing what Pope Pius XII stressed in the opening
paragraphs of his definitive document, Hariatis Aquas. Before he went
on to explain the meaning of Devotion to the Heart of Jesus, and urge its promotion
among the faithful, the Pope went to considerable effort to alert the Bishops
and Church leaders to the errors prevalent, not outside the Church, but among
Catholics regarding what he called a synthesis of Christianity.

These errors, declared the Pope, are in outright disagreement with the teachings
which our predecessors officially proclaimed from this seal of truth (#14).

There is no doubt that Devotion to the Heart of Christ has a promising future
in the Catholic Church, and from the Church to the whole family of the human
race. But on one condition: that we who promote this devotion are alert, in
our day, to the erroneous ideas widely prevalent in nominally Catholic circles;
that we recognize and are able to distinguish true Christological development
from its spurious counterpart; and that we follow the teachings of the Churchs
magisterium, specifically of the Bishops of Rome in answering for our contemporaries
what Christ asked His contemporaries, Who do you say that I am. On the correct
answer to Christs question depends all the good, the marvelous good that in
Gods providence we can do in our world by advancing the knowledge and love
and service of the Heart of Jesus, who is our God become man for our salvation.